Articles and Resources

QUOTE: interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.

QUOTE: Romney has no political heirs in his own party or elsewhere, he does leave behind a cultural legacy of sorts. He raised Truthiness to a level of chutzpah beyond Stephen Colbert’s fertile imagination, and on the grandest scale. That a presidential hopeful so cavalierly mendacious could get so close to the White House, winning some 48 percent of the popular vote, is no small accomplishment. The American weakness that Romney both apotheosized and exploited in achieving this feat—our post-fact syndrome where anyone on the public stage can make up anything and usually get away with it—won’t disappear with him. A slicker liar could have won, and still might....This year’s instantly famous declaration by the Romney pollster Neil Newhouse that “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers” crystallized the mantra of the entire GOP. The Republican faithful at strata both low and high, from Rush’s dittoheads to the think-tank-affiliated intellectuals, have long since stopped acknowledging any empirical evidence that disputes their insular worldview, no matter how grounded that evidence might be in (God forbid) science or any other verifiable reality, like, say, Census reports or elementary mathematics

QUOTE: North Carolina voted Tuesday to outlaw same-sex marriage, which was already prohibited in the state. Supporters pushed for the constitutional amendment, arguing that it is needed to ward off future legal challenges.

QUOTE: Florida, which is expected to be a vital swing state once again in this year’s presidential election, is enrolling fewer new voters than it did four years ago as prominent civic organizations have suspended registration drives because of what they describe as onerous restrictions imposed last year by Republican state officials.

QUOTE: Both liberals and conservatives have the American Constitution in the cross hairs. They assault the Constitution in their different ways, each with damaging effects on our nation. Conservatives attack the courts on one hand and seek to have them advance their activist agenda on the other. Liberals, when it suits them, embrace rights that have not been enumerated in the Constitution and cry for restraint only when their pet bills come under fire. The result is a national jurisprudence whetted by political appetite, with our democratic values as the victims.

QUOTE: Mr. Gingrich, Democrats and Republicans here agree, emerged as one of Washington’s most aggressive practitioners of slash-and-burn politics; many fault him for erasing whatever civility once existed in the capital. He believed, and preached, that harsh language could win elections; in 1990, the political action committee he ran, Gopac, instructed Republican candidates to learn to “speak like Newt,” and offered a list of words to describe Democrats — like decay, traitors, radical, sick, destroy, pathetic, corrupt and shame. Those same qualities are now on display as Mr. Gingrich, a Republican candidate for president, turns his caustic tongue against Republicans and Democrats alike.

QUOTE: President Obama pledged on Tuesday night to use government power to balance the scale between America’s rich and the rest of the public, trying to present an election-year choice between continued leadership toward an economy “built to last” and what he called irresponsible policies of the past that caused an economic collapse.

QUOTE: Many of Mr. Gingrich’s proposals would replace the judicial independence generally thought to be a defining feature of the federal system with aspects of the political accountability associated with state judicial elections.

QUOTE: three decades of Republican resistance to the board — an unwillingness to recognize the fundamental right of workers to band together, if they wish, to seek better pay and working conditions. But Mr. Obama is also partly to blame; in trying to install partisan stalwarts on the board, as his predecessors did, he is all but guaranteeing that the impasse will continue.

QUOTE: Institutional reforms themselves require a change in the mind-sets of our political leaders, and they will not happen without compromise. Either legislators adopt a compromising attitude, in which case the reforms are not essential, or they do not adopt it, in which case they will not be able to agree on the reforms. There is no deus ex machina that will save Congress from itself.

QUOTE: [The Bork] nomination battle is also a reminder that our poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be — and have been — every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.

QUOTE: the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, with two Republican members, two Democratic members and an independent chairwoman, has found itself subject to such fierce attacks that its work is being questioned even before that work has been done. The stakes are high — explosive population growth over the last decade, especially among Latinos, entitles the state to one more Congressional seat, its ninth.

QUOTE: The success of populist parties appealing to a sense of lost national identity has brought criticism of minorities, immigrants and in particular Muslims out of the beer halls and Internet chat rooms and into mainstream politics. While the parties themselves generally do not condone violence, some experts say a climate of hatred in the political discourse has encouraged violent individuals.

QUOTE: ...Mr. Pawlenty’s fiscal record as governor is drawing closer scrutiny. And while Mr. Pawlenty did face economic and political challenges in balancing the state’s budget each year, his record includes what critics say was an overreliance on one-time accounting maneuvers that failed to address the underlying problems.

QUOTE: We might wish politicians and pundits from opposing parties to engage in reasoned debate about the truth, but as we know, this is not the reality of our political discourse. Instead we often encounter bizarre and improbable claims about public figures. Words are misappropriated and meanings twisted. I believe that these tactics are not really about making substantive claims, but rather play the role of silencing.

QUOTE: Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born....Passage of same-sex marriage here followed a daunting run of defeats in other states where voters barred same-sex marriage by legislative action, constitutional amendment or referendum. Just five states currently permit same-sex marriage...

QUOTE: The Department of Homeland Security has stepped back for the past two years from conducting its own intelligence and analysis of home-grown extremism...The decision to reduce the department’s role was provoked by conservative criticism of an intelligence report on “Rightwing Extremism” issued four months into the Obama administration, the officials said.

QUOTE: A majority of those swept into our nation’s prison system are poor people of color, but the sudden shift away from the “get tough” rhetoric that has dominated the national discourse on crime has not been inspired by a surge in concern about the devastating human toll of mass incarceration. Instead, as Professor Bell predicted, the changing tide is best explained by perceived white interests. In this economic climate, it is impossible to maintain the vast prison state without raising taxes on the (white) middle class.

QUOTE: “These are government unions that are negotiating oftentimes against the taxpayers… It’s not fair that the taxpayer-funded payroll system is collecting union dues that are used politically against the taxpayer.”

QUOTE: There’s something immoral about giving handouts to entrenched corporate interests with armies of lobbyists while seeking to cut those to hungry children, struggling families and frail seniors… In the last several months, Republican state lawmakers and party officials have said the most reprehensible things about Hispanics, gays and blacks.

QUOTE: Terrible sex education programs and a lack of access to contraceptives leads to a huge number of births to poor women… The Texas baby boom… marches off to underfunded schools... One of the first things the cash-strapped Legislature tried to cut was family planning.

QUOTE: In a multiple-prong attack on NPR, Republicans slashed funding for public broadcasting, then passed an additional “emergency” bill to prohibit independent stations from using federal grants to buy NPR programs... So why go after such a meager sum for public radio, when it means so much to the least-populated areas of America? Spite. Ideology.

QUOTE: The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t allow tax filers to write off their donations to politicians or parties, because that would mean Republicans would be subsidizing Democratic political efforts, and vice versa. So why should gifts that often seek the same outcomes through nonprofit organizations be treated differently?

QUOTE: The hard right... has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment... But there’s a clear chilling effect when scholars know that they may face witch hunts whenever they say things the G.O.P. doesn’t like.

QUOTE: [Republicans] claim to care deeply about deficits — but they’ve spent the past two years putting cynical, demagogic attacks on any attempt to actually deal with long-run deficits at the heart of their campaign strategy.

QUOTE: Democrats, meanwhile, condemned the move as an attack on working families, a violation of open meetings requirements (most of them did not know there was to be a vote until not long before), and a virtual firebomb in state that already found itself politically polarized and consumed with recall efforts, large scale protests and fury from public workers.

QUOTE: Across the ideological spectrum, officials and activists agreed after Saturday's Tucson killings that it was time to soften the harsh edges of America's raucous national dialogue. But by Monday, a bitter debate had erupted over how to do it - and on whose terms.

QUOTE: While the individual components of Arizona are shared by other states, the mix of the state’s border proximity, rapid growth and dire fiscal circumstances have combined in the last few years into a riveting and sometimes chilling theater of fiscal, political and cultural tensions.

QUOTE: The judge, Henry E. Hudson of Federal District Court in Richmond, said the law’s requirement that most Americans obtain insurance exceeded the regulatory authority granted to Congress under the Commerce Clause... “Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market.”

QUOTE: The White House and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized profusely and repeatedly on Wednesday to a black midlevel official [Shirley Sherrod--Ed.] for the way she had been humiliated and forced to resign her Agriculture Department job after a conservative blogger put out a misleading video clip that seemed to show her admitting antipathy toward a white farmer.

QUOTE: Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan, where the main players — the United States, India and Israel — change positions depending on the ebb and flow of history. Since 2001, the United States has taken center stage, looming so large in Pakistan’s collective imagination that it sometimes seems to be responsible for everything that goes wrong here.

QUOTE: ...McLeroy has argued that the revisions provide balance to a set of standards that did not initially paint America in a positive light. Both liberals and conservatives on the board have called the changes "political" -- but they have disagreed on whether that was a bad thing.

QUOTE: Through a legal ban, French parliamentarians want to uphold a principle that should apply to all: the visibility of the face in the public sphere, which is essential to our security and is a condition for living together. A few extremists are contesting this obvious fact by using our democratic liberties as an instrument against democracy. We have to tell them no.

QUOTE: the hyperpartisan political atmosphere is narrowing the options for dealing with the chronic budget shortfall. The latest sign: the emphatic rejection by both parties in recent days of a value-added tax, a sales tax imposed by nearly every other developed nation.

QUOTE: The pitched battle over health care has unleashed a rash of vandalism and attacks directed at politicians, with at least 10 House Democrats reporting death threats or incidents of harassment or vandalism at their district offices over the past week.

QUOTE: Into the heightened political atmosphere between the Supreme Court and the Obama administration comes now Virginia Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, who is founder of a new nonprofit lobbying and political-organizing group catering to the "citizen activists" of the "tea party" movement. Virginia "Ginni" Thomas says Liberty Central Inc...

QUOTE: The act of counting people is more patently political than ever...In this country, census officials are responding to complaints on the right by conducting unprecedented outreach with ads aimed at political conservatives -- a subset of the group with the biggest over-count: white Americans.

QUOTE: Arthur Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, feels that the real culture war in America today is not about gay marriage or abortion, divisive though those issues are, but about capitalism.

QUOTE: Republicans in general charge that since none of the [healthcare] bills contain enforcement mechanisms to check that recipients of government subsidies are legal, illegal immigrants would be able to sneak into the system and get US cash [for healthcare subsidies] anyway.

QUOTE: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was officially inaugurated for a second term Wednesday... Now Tehran is holding its breath, wondering if Ahmadinejad will seek to consolidate his position by widening his ongoing crackdown against reformers and his political opponents.

QUOTE: Although the impact of Bush's judicial appointments is most often noticed at the Supreme Court, it has played out much more frequently and more importantly here and in the nation's 12 other appellate courts, where his appointees and their liberal counterparts are waging often-bitter ideological battles.

QUOTE: ...Mr. McCain denounces Mr. Obama for wanting to redistribute wealth, hitting especially hard on Mr. Obama’s plan to give tax credits, in the form of checks, to some people who do not pay income tax. (Mr. McCain omits the fact that his own health care plan would do much the same thing, giving tax credits of $5,000 to families for health insurance, regardless of whether they pay income taxes.)

QUOTE: “The American media has hit a new low in tabloid journalism,” he declared. “They’ve taken a 17-year-old girl and they are trying to use the crisis pregnancy she finds herself in as a battering ram, a club, to damage her mother, her family. It’s outrageous. It’s tabloid journalism and they ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

QUOTE: The protest followed weeks of controversy surrounding the student organizers’ decision to give a platform to David Irving, a historian specializing in Hitler’s Germany who was released late last year after serving 13 months of a three-year prison term imposed in Austria for speeches denying that the Nazis exterminated six millions Jews.

QUOTE: Since her appointment to the post in September, she has emerged as a stalwart defender of a country’s right to require immigrants to accept its basic values and, inevitably, a lightning rod in Europe’s continuing debate over immigration.